Elephants Dream

Elephants Dream was supposed to be the flagship project of the open source community. And while it was a very interesting idea in concept, in reality it has failed miserably.

The film is beautifully rendered, which is probably the only redeeming factor. A huge problem with them, however, is the vast overruse of light bloom. It's horrible, although I guess it helps give the film a dreamlike quality.

One thing to note is the terrible voice acting. While Proog's voice actor is at least semi-competent, Emo's voice actor is HORRIBLE. I guess when you have a budget that basically amounts to zero, you can't afford to hire real voice actors. To me it seems like they hired one of the animators to do his voice.

As a whole, the movie doesn't really go anywhere. To me it seems like it's more of a "look what we can do" kind of movie instead of a real film. The plot goes nowhere and fails at really showing any interesting point. The whole movie feels like it was made as an excuse to make interesting looking areas.

Overall, it may be worth a quick download from the official site, but don't expect anything except pretty graphics.

Overall, this movie is quite impressive. One must remember that it was made entirely using free software, and for free (except for the money received from DVD pre-orders and also from donations from corporations). The story is about two characters, emo and proog, who are in a surrealistic dream world. Throughout the course of the movie (about 11 minutes) they encounter various environments, some weirder than others. The title "Elephants Dream" is supposed to be a reference to how Dutch children's stories abruptly end. Anyone expecting a plot, jokes, or some deep underlying meaning will probably be disappointed (although I found some of the choreography amusing), but those who watch it with the thought in mind that is supposed to be mainly a technology demonstration of what can be done with free software will be impressed.

Bottom line: Great looking, but no storyline, jokes or puns. *FREE*.

The best (only) free animated short out there of commercial quality

NOTE: I used the VLC player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) to view this movie, and as long as you have a decent processor and don't run it full screen you should get an excellent performance.

Having been a user of Blender for a few years, I couldn't wait to see this film. Having recruited the most talented users this was to be Blenders big promotional push to the rest of the cg industry, the expectation was high for something special.

The result is a very mixed affair. Technically this is amazing, very few users have been able to squeeze this kind of performance from the best open source 3d package. Modeling, lighting, texturing, animation, rendering all are very high quality. This brings me onto the obvious and often heard criticism: the story is almost buried under it's own multi-layered highbrow pretentious Art wannabe hopes.

Sadly what should have been accessible and inviting, ironically,instead reflects Blenders UI: unappealing and awkward.

As a film it's a failure, as a HD-DVD tech demo(first in Europe*yawn*) it's great.

This film is truly a visually stunning one, with it's mechanical dreamscapes and multitude of fascinating details. Sadly, the character animation is rather primitive – especially the lip synching – making the general impression of the creatures inhibiting the world more lifeless than the world itself. The films main problem, however, is the inconsistent, underdeveloped story line. The problem is not that the story is vague, but rather that it neither asks nor answers any questions, nor does it encourage the viewer to do so. It is more of an anti-story really, a substitute for a real plot.

In the end, this is nothing more than a technology demo – and a rather failed demo too, since it clearly shows that no matter how competent the blender software is at creating scenery, it clearly cannot animate lifelike creatures.

The whole movie was about showing off the prowess and muscularity of the Blender app. A lot of people still are oblivious of the sheer versatility of free software. This movie was created to, above all else, show what Blender could do -- not for the sheer objective of entertainment. Most viewer are certain to have been drawn to seeing this movie because, let's face it, they like CGI movie. Isn't that why we all scrambled to see THE SPIRITS WITHIN when it first came out? Well, yes, agreed, The Elephants Dream doesn't make it too far when you rate it by how intelligent or intelligible the underlying message of the project is. Like I've been trying to point out; it wasn't made to match any Danielle Steel novel. It was made to show that you can achieve GREAT animation with Blender. You mustn't always take recourse to apps like Maya and 3D studio Max. Absolutely free software can make great movie!